something in the way

Kiva, the microfinance site, lets you give small loans to people around the world to help them get their small business up and running. This animated map shows how 620,000 funded 615,000 borrowers, from the start of Kiva in 2005 up until now. Watch in full-screen for maximum effect.

Colors indicate loan type, which confused me at first, because I thought the map was saying that specific loan types were only given out during each time of year. It's actually cycling through the loan types though, so you can see the breakdowns as the animation plays through, and then it shows all loans at once at the end of each year.

The only thing that's missing are some counters for the amount of money passing hands. It's been an impressive $240 million in loans around the world with a repayment rate of almost 99 percent.

[Thanks, Andy]

A few months ago there was a lot of hoopla around the iPhone and the recording of your location. Crowdflow wants to take advantage of this opportunity to build an open database of location traces that people can use for research. Using their existing data so far, from 880 phones, Michael Kreil of Crowdflow mapped people moving around in Europe (in Germany for the most part). The results are beautiful.

The movements have a lovely firefly aesthetic as people, or I guess phones, move about the area. City centers of course glow brighter, and areas pulsate as night time comes and then becomes bright again in the morning.

Watch the animation play out in the videos below. The two are the same data, but with different color schemes. Increase size and resolutions for maximum effect. All it needs is some music for ultimate sexy.

[Crowdflow via infosthetics]

Motion designer Patrick Clair tells the story of Stuxnet, "a Microsoft Windows computer worm discovered in July 2010 that targets industrial software and equipment." Unlike many viruses and worms, Stuxnet was designed with a specific target — Siemens Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems — and left any other systems unharmed. Stuxnet could then increase pressure in nuclear reactors and turn off oil pipelines, all the while showing monitors everything was fine.

Get the full skinny in Clair's well done motion graphic video below.

[Video link | Thanks, Nigel]

Founded in 1985 by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Professor Nicholas Negroponte and former MIT President Jerome Wiesner in an I.M. Pei-designed building, the MIT Media Lab is one of the world's most renown research and development centers. Funded by corporate sponsorship, the Media Lab counted with a $26 million budget in 2009 – 10 and served 138 graduate students and 28 faculty and principal investigators. "Unconstrained by traditional disciplines, Lab designers, engineers, artists, and scientists work atelier-style in close to 30 research groups conducting more than 400 projects that range from neuroengineering, to how children learn, to developing the city car of the future." Inspired by the facility's expansion in 2010, which "manifests the spirit of transparency, mutual inspiration and collaboration" this new logo designed in collaboration by E Roon Kang and TheGreenEyl was recently introduced.

The new visual identity of the MIT Media Lab is inspired by the community it comprises: Highly creative people from all kinds of backgrounds come together, inspire each other and collaboratively develop a vision of the future.

This unique offering of the MIT Media Lab is reflected in the logo design. Each of the three shapes stands for one individual's contribution, the resulting shape represents the outcome of this process: A constant redefinition of what media and technology means today.The logo is based on a visual system, an algorithm that produces a unique logo for each person, for faculty, staff and students. […] A custom web interface was developed to allow each person at the Media Lab to choose and claim an own individual logo for his/her business card, as well as a custom animation so?ware which allows to create custom animations for any video content the lab produces.
— TheGreenEyl Project Page

MIT Media Lab Identity, 2010 from readyletsgo on Vimeo.

Relative to what we all understand to be a good logo — one that is aesthetically pleasing and that somewhat efficiently communicates a particular aspect of a product, service, or organization — this logo is not good. Except that, well, it is. It is very good. The three squares don't really mean much, the gradients are fairly gratuitous, and the final compositions are all awkward. But as a representation of this mythical place where magic happens and where we imagine herds of nerds of the highest caliber working away on things most of us will never understand (unless they are bundled nicely like the Media Lab's One Laptop Per Child) this is perfect. It's unexpected and distinct, and it oozes as much science cred as a logo is able to do.

What's also interesting is that the logo doesn't have to "sell" the Media Lab, it sells itself. So the pressure on the identity to be consumer-friendly is minimal, it should simply act like the Lab itself. I wouldn't want that logo on my business card, but if I were a sponsor putting in millions of dollars, I wouldn't mind it being handed to me on a business card by one of them nerds.

Sign in button expands and folds out once clicked.

Try it for yourself here

/via Matthew Farag

Eloi of playmodes sends in this beautiful, extended (20 minutes) projection mapping performance, for the Ingravid Festival, in Figueres, Spain.

Telenoika Audiovisual Mapping @ Ingravid Festival, Figueres 9/2009 [FULL] from Telenoika on Vimeo.

Created by Telenoika, this performance is a tour de force of established projection mapping techniques and styles: Virtual lighting, 3D augmentation and distortion, edge highlighting and surface painting.

Mixed with lovely sound design, they’ve also added some nice new touches: The “light bulb generation” at 4:12 is lovely, as is the subsequent thunderstorm and electrocution of the building.

What this piece really does, that I’m excited to see more of, is establish a narrative. We’ve got our basic projection mapping building blocks now. Clever people will think of new, cool stuff to do, but while that’s going on, it’s time to start using these techniques to really tell some stories. Not just about things happening to the building or space, but inside it.

Another exciting development is that the “warping and video player software” was developed in OpenFrameworks [on CDMo] by Eloi, and he will be sharing it soon. In the meantime, you can check out some of his other development on the Playmodes Blog.

Elsewhere:
Playmodes/Eloi on Vimeo.
Telenoika on Vimeo.
Ingravid Festival

wee see – collection one from Rolyn Barthelman on Vimeo.

When working with drawing code – or perhaps even computer media in general – starting out with simple shapes can feel oddly uncomfortable. Perhaps as adults, we’re accustomed to dressing up our work and our identities. Using something as basic as a regular triangle can feel naked and dry.

As kids, we don’t think this way. We love bright colors and simple shapes, maybe because we’re seeing everything for the first time. And maybe it’s simply that we have more imagination. (How many young kids have you seen in utter states of bliss with empty boxes and wrapping paper?) Of course, imagination and playfulness is just the state a lot of us want out of our art.

That’s why it’s so encouraging to me to see the work of Rolyn Barthelman and Wee See. This is serious play: if you really master form, pattern, and motion, you can make beautiful work using nothing but elemental shapes. And it’s also playfully serious: it’s crisp, it’s minimal, but it also feels like playing around with blocks. And, okay, sure, mostly during the brilliant animations in Sesame Street as a kid I was waiting for the Muppets to reappear. Maybe I’d even appreciate that more now.

Not surprisingly, Wee See’s current favorite toy is Colorforms, the stick-on vinyl shapes. Check out their ode to the glory of Colorforms. (This actually makes me want to make my own Colorforms geometries – perhaps get a library in Processing that can also be transferred to physical objects! Anyone tried making your own vinyl stickies? I won’t sell them / risk violating the Colorforms patent.)

Wee See found via that evergreen source of inspiration, Motionographer.

Yet another wonderful animation from this group; I can’t wait to see more:

wee see – collection two from Rolyn Barthelman on Vimeo.

Side note on the essential nature of simple shapes: while peeking around the Creative Commons search on Flickr, I happened across this very vital use of colorform-like shapes, as photographed by scary toy clown/spezz. Someone with Naval experience may be able to tell me exactly what’s going on here, but I find it interesting that – as with the toy – in a military application, economy and efficiency matters. That says a lot about design.

An almost perfect example of some deep and subtle work with a flexible tool, creating magical results:

Ólafur Arnalds – Ljósið (Official Music Video) from Erased Tapes on Vimeo.

If you’ve spent any length of time with Particular, you’ll recognize this instantly. The look of the Spherical Field and spread lines of particles when the emitter moves quickly are unmistakable. Software quirks aside, this really is spectacular looking work for such a simple tool. The colour, depth of field and organic movement are truly beautiful, and it showcases Particular 2.0’s composition light shading to lovely effect.

The piece was originally created by Esteban Diacono as an animation test, using one of the tracks from Icelandic artist Ólafur Arnalds‘ Found Songs project, and was subsequently picked up as the official video for the track.

Esteban answered some questions about the production in the comments for his original piece:
It uses After Effects, Particular 2.0, and SoundKeys, with a smattering of Starglow.
The particles are standard particular Spheres and Cloudlets.
The cast shadows aren’t native to Particular, but are created as a separate layer, blurred and masked.
It took 11 hours to render at 720p on a Core2 Duo with 4GB RAM.